U.S. Tightens Noose on Baghdad

U.S. troops began to lay a cordon around a battered, blacked-out Baghdad on Thursday, squeezing the Iraqi capital from two sides and capturing a major prize, Saddam International Airport.

Huge explosions could be seen in and around Baghdad as the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division pushed up from the southwest and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force swooped in from the southeast. In bold defiance of Iraqi resistance, the Marines left the headlights of their vehicles on at night so they could move faster.

“A vise is closing, and the days of a brutal regime are coming to an end,” President Bush told an audience of 20,000 at Camp Lejeune, N.C., the Marine Corps’ largest East Coast base. “The course is set. We’re on the advance. Our destination is Baghdad, and we will accept nothing less than complete and final victory.”

As Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, outlined a strategy in which allied forces would encircle Baghdad and wait for the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, U.S. troops took a step toward that goal with the capture of the city’s major international airport.

Reports from the scene described a blistering firefight in which the Americans seized the airport building by building, killing more than 300 Iraqi soldiers. There were no immediate reports of U.S. casualties. Fighting continued this morning, but U.S. forces were said to be in control of the bulk of the airport.

U.S. officials said the taking of the airport will allow American and British commanders to fly in troops, military equipment and supplies and could enable them to augment the relatively small number of ground forces outside the capital. It also could foil efforts by the Iraqi leadership to flee by air.

Collectively, the breathtaking speed of Thursday’s gains, the sense -- at least psychologically -- of an allied encirclement of the capital, plus the absence of any well-organized Iraqi military defenses, left the impression that Hussein’s regime may be entering its final days.

Still, with doubts about the exact location of remaining Iraqi Republican Guard units, and with many paramilitary fighters said to be prepared to defend the capital, U.S. officials stressed that the war could be far from over.

“The regime has been weakened, to be sure, but it is still lethal,” Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said at the Pentagon. “And it may prove to be more lethal in the final moments before it ends.”

There were reports that U.S. troops in the vanguard of the advance were ordered to wear rubber boots and protective suits in case of a last-ditch chemical or biological attack. With temperatures in Baghdad climbing into the 90s -- and expected to hit 100 Saturday -- it was not an order to be given lightly.

In the face of a furious, two-pronged U.S. assault, battlefield reports sketched a picture of Iraqi defenses in disarray, with an overall lack of any coordinated resistance. U.S. commanders and reporters traveling with advancing units said resistance appeared in most cases to be limited to small groups of Iraqi soldiers, no more than a few dozen at a time, making token efforts to halt the advance with little apparent success.

In one such battle, Cyclone Company of the 3rd Infantry Division’s 4th Battalion, 64th Armored Regiment, was locked in a firefight south of Baghdad for more than two hours before overcoming Iraqi soldiers firing small arms and rocket-propelled grenades.

There are no large Iraqi units coordinating a defense of the capital’s outer ring, sources at U.S. Central Command said in Doha, Qatar. Two Republican Guard divisions, the Medina and the Baghdad, were effectively destroyed as cohesive operating units after Wednesday’s fighting, according to U.S. officials, who said American troops have pounded the Iraqi forces with a relentless air and ground campaign.

“We can’t tell who’s in charge,” Army Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks told reporters at a briefing at Central Command in Doha. “I don’t think the Iraqi people can tell who’s in charge either, and we have indications that the Iraq forces don’t know who’s in charge.”

Hussein appeared again on Iraqi TV, meeting with his top aides. As with other such appearances since the war began, it was impossible to tell when the videotape was made. There has been widespread speculation that the Iraqi leader died or was injured in the U.S. airstrikes that began the war, or that he has fled the country.

By late Thursday, journalists traveling with American forces described large flows of young Iraqi men in civilian clothes streaming south from Baghdad, apparently hoping either to surrender or flee. North of the city of Hillah, about 30 miles south of the capital, the stream of men was so large that it slowed the Marines’ way forward.

Despite dramatic accounts of the American dash north, Iraqi government officials dismissed reports of fighting near the capital as lies. In fact, they said, the allied armies were being crushed by Iraqi soldiers in a battle far from Baghdad, in towns southeast of Karbala.

“There are no troops here,” Information Minister Mohammed Said Sahaf said in an interview with the pan-Arab satellite television channel Al Jazeera on Thursday night. “The battle took place ... south of the capital, southeast of Karbala, and Republican Guard units are finishing them off. These cowards have no morals. They have no shame to lie.”

In the capital, there was heavy bombing through the night but, unlike previous nights, there was virtually no antiaircraft fire and no sirens or the call to prayer. It was unusually silent.

Hours after Central Command first announced that lead elements of the U.S. forces had reached the airport early Thursday, Iraqi officials escorted international media representatives to a quiet, largely deserted terminal, clearly still in Iraqi hands.

Central Command officials indicated that U.S. reconnaissance teams had reached the airport, southwest of central Baghdad, earlier in the day, then pulled back in preparation for the successful assault that began Thursday night.

Control of the airport should give the Pentagon the ability to fly in a brigade-sized force of the Army’s 4th Infantry Division along with its equipment, speeding heavy armored reinforcements to the U.S. front lines. There now are about 40,000 U.S. Army and Marine troops on the outskirts of Baghdad -- not enough, in the estimation of many military officials, to mount a well-thought-out and cautious attack on a city of more than 5 million people.

U.S. forces also have taken control of dozens of other airports and airstrips throughout Iraq, and are landing cargo planes and other craft at the airstrips daily, speeding the resupply of ammunition, food and other supplies to U.S. and British forces, military officials said.

Baghdad was plunged into darkness at about 8 p.m. Thursday when the city’s power grid failed for the first time since the war began. Although the capital has been pummeled daily by allied airstrikes, U.S. officials have avoided hitting the electrical system, saying they didn’t want to hurt ordinary Iraqis unnecessarily. A U.S. military spokesman denied Thursday that allied forces had triggered the blackout.

Among Thursday’s targets was the Iraqi air force headquarters building in the central part of the city, the Central Command said.

The U.S. advance on the ground relied on a pincer movement by the Army and Marines.

The Army’s 3rd Infantry broke through Iraqi lines near Karbala on Wednesday, and continued up a major highway to the airport Thursday night. There were reports of heavy civilian casualties from shelling in one village in the path of the advance to the airport. The reports could not be confirmed.

Meanwhile, about 60 miles to the east, a large convoy of Marine tanks, Humvees and armored personnel carriers barreled northward with a new sense of anticipation. Conversations during refueling stops were quieter and more serious. Gone was the banter about baseball scores and women, replaced by pointed discussion of the mission ahead.

“It feels good to be on the move,” said Marine Cpl. Edward Guzman, 21, of Puerto Rico. “We’re finally closing in on our objective, Baghdad.”

As the convoy moved north, it passed scores of sandbagged shooting positions along the roadside, all of them abandoned. As the Marines rolled through villages that had sustained heavy U.S. bombing, past burnt-out cars and rubble, Iraqi residents emerged into the streets to watch and wave. Marines tossed food to children.

At one point, an armored backhoe hit a spot in the road where Iraqis had buried landmines in the asphalt. The explosion damaged the vehicle, but no one was hurt.

Earlier in the day, the Marines had battled a limited number of the Republican Guard’s Baghdad Division, which had regrouped in the city of Al Kut, about 90 miles southeast of Baghdad, and joined with Baath Party and paramilitary fighters in resisting the Americans. The battle ended after several hours when Marines cut down a last-ditch suicide charge by about a dozen Iraqi fighters, officials said.

For the better part of the day, Marines using howitzers and mortars, Cobra gunships and tanks pounded the Iraqi positions. Half a dozen helicopters buzzed overhead, firing at targets that included antiaircraft guns. Artillery shells whizzed through the sky. Ground troops finally went in to finish the battle. Five or six huge black plumes of smoke rose from the city in the wake of the fighting.

No U.S. casualties were reported in that fighting, but losses among Iraqis were said to be high. At least 60 men surrendered, most of them out of uniform.

Truckloads of prisoners were sent south to POW camps. In some areas on the outskirts of Al Kut, discarded boots and trousers could be seen on the roadside.

U.S. Special Forces were also in action, working with Kurdish forces in northern Iraq to control several miles of the road between Mosul and the oil city of Kirkuk, severing the main road between Baghdad and Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit.

Special Forces soldiers also raided a palace known to be used by Hussein and his sons about 55 miles north of the capital.

In central Iraq, an Army V Corps soldier became the first American determined to have been killed by “friendly fire” when he was mistaken for an Iraqi soldier and fired upon by allied troops while investigating an Iraqi tank, Central Command reported. The soldier’s identity was withheld pending notification of relatives.

Near Al Kut, a Marine was reportedly killed in his sleep when his automatic weapon accidentally discharged, striking him in the chest.

The decisive nature of the allied advance appeared to give courage to a growing number of Iraqis to defy the regime. British and U.S. forces said they have seen a noticeable increase in the number of civilians willing to take risks by providing them with tips or other intelligence about the movements of Baath Party functionaries and paramilitary fighters loyal to Hussein.

Reports of large numbers of young men offering to surrender is also viewed as an indicator that Hussein’s power may be starting to slip.

In Umm al Qasr, the port city that was among the first targets of the invasion, Shiite Muslims were reported to have performed a public ritual of self-flagellation that had been banned under Hussein. Marching through the town Thursday, about 200 Shiites beat their chests, recited religious verses and chanted, “Saddam, your days are numbered,” the Reuters news agency reported.

In the holy city of Najaf in south-central Iraq, the Army’s 101st Airborne Division won friends when it planted explosives around a 25-foot-tall statue of Hussein and allowed a local opposition figure to blow it up. “Thank you very much,” said the man, who would not give his name. “When they first built this, it was my dream to blow it up.”

In the south, Col. Chris Vernon, spokesman for the British army, said British forces were getting more information from people in the Basra area about where Iraqi paramilitaries were hiding, in part by using food and water deliveries to win support.

His troops have taken 3,500 prisoners of war, including a general and other high-ranking officers. “We’re getting good, useful information from the senior POWs and the Baath Party officials,” Vernon said.

British Desert Rats penetrated the edges of Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city, and reportedly captured an industrial park that had been used as a firing position by stubborn Iraqi resistance fighters.

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Perry reported with the 1st Marine Division and Mohan with the 3rd Infantry Division. Times staff writers David Wharton in Kuwait; Tyler Marshall and Jailan Zayan in Doha; Richard Boudreaux in Ankara, Turkey; Edwin Chen in Camp Lejeune, N.C.; and John Hendren, Greg Miller and Esther Schrader in Washington contributed to this report.

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Casualties

*--* Military totals (as of 8:30 p.m. Pacific time Thursday)

U.S Britain Iraq Killed 55 27 Unknown

Missing 16 0 Unknown

Captured 7 0 4,500

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Civilian casualties

* Iraq has said at least 650 civilians have been killed. Two British journalists, an Australian journalist and an Iranian journalist also have died.